RL's Dream

Seventeen

“Kiki, could you come into the office a moment?” Sheldon Meyers asked.

She could have said, “Later, Sheldon, I got to get the change list down to production or they won’t make the run tonight,” just to make him wait. But she didn’t because there was sweat on his upper lip. Sheldon’s lips only perspired when there was something seriously wrong.

“Have you ever seen this?” he asked, handing her a blue policy folder.

She wished that she was sitting down when she saw the names Atwater and Tanya Wise next to INSURED. There was all the information she’d keyed in two months before. And under that was a list of payments made for radiation treatments, doctor’s visits, and medicine. The total was $186,042.28.

The speed of light, Kiki thought. The moon entered her mind; the cold moon and the darkness that surrounded it.

“No,” she said with a dry throat. “Never, ahem, never.”

Kiki handed the folder back to Sheldon and sat down, trying to look natural. She crossed her legs and sat back.

“It came through my office,” Sheldon said. “You know I sign a lot of these things, but when the money’s this high I usually check it. I usually send it down to the adjusters. I mean, I don’t just sign everything that comes across my desk.”

Kiki felt the dull thud of a hammer against the inside of her chest. An urge came over her to run, run right out of there. She could go back down south. Down to Arkansas. Nobody could find her in the small towns. She could work anywhere, live in the woods. Her father would never have to know she was there. She could never let him know where she was. For years after she’d run from home she worried that he would find her. He used to whisper in her ear, while he had his whole fist up in her rectum, that she could never get away; that he knew people all over the country and if she ran he’d send her picture to everyone he knew and they’d be looking for her and the police would bring her back home. He could find her anywhere and pull her right off the street, no one would even try to stop him. He’d whisper all that while opening his hand inside her. She’d gasp, helpless as he gripped her on the inside, and she believed him — every word.

“They’ve been investigating it for two weeks,” Sheldon said. “They didn’t even tell me about it until this morning.”

“Why not? Do they think you did something?”

“No,” he said reassuringly. “Not at all. They think that it was somebody in computer operations working with this couple.” Sheldon turned the folder and pointed at the names. “They routed the papers and checks to an interoffice box and then forged the name with a stamp from the VP’s office.”

“How’d they get that?” Kiki asked, trying to act like she didn’t have the guile to figure it out.

“There’s at least half a dozen of them floating around operations. And there’s one in the locked box at the end of the hall. It’s locked but almost everybody has the combination.

“It doesn’t matter, though. Now that we know, we’ll be able to trace it down.”

“How long will that take?”

Sheldon hunched his small shoulders.

Hot needles poked from behind Kiki’s eyes. She couldn’t get a full breath. Sheldon was talking again but she didn’t, she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Her intestines started rumbling and she was on the verge of throwing up. The stitches in her side, almost healed now, began pinching.

Then came the sound.

At first it was a distant booming, like someone playing a kettledrum down in the basement with all the doors closed. But as it got louder it became harder and less resonant. And then, for one moment, Kiki was back in the dream. Her father’s hard soles banging around in the basement and then loud knocking...

A jolt went through her body. Suddenly everything was all right, everything was calm. The cool of a fever breaking passed over her forehead and down the back of her neck.

“Whatever it is that’s wrong,” she said, “it beats gettin’ fist-fucked up the ass.”

Sheldon’s mouth dropped open.

Kiki reached across the desk and picked up the folder.

“I’ll see if I have anything about this in the files, Sheldon.” She went out to her desk and put the folder in its alphabetical place in the file cabinet. That was at ten-thirty in the morning.

Kiki came home early that day with an armful of groceries. She had hamburger and sweet peas and French bread. She brought home lemon and apple pies with vanilla ice cream and two six-packs of Old New York beer. In a separate bag she had her every-other-day bottle of sour-mash whiskey.

Soupspoon and Randy were at the table, talking blues. Soupspoon had his wedding suit on and his guitar out. His tape recorder was plugged into the wall and running.

“Hi guys,” she said with a big smile.

“Hi.” Randy waved.

Soupspoon looked up and scowled. He’d never seen her home from work early. He was half worried that Kiki would be mad to find somebody else in the house. But she didn’t seem to mind. Soupspoon was relieved, because just that morning, when he’d been tuning his guitar, he felt a twinge in his chest and a sharp jolt down his leg.

“That’s what music’s all about, Randy,” Soupspoon had been saying before Kiki came in. “It’s all about gettin’ so close to pain that it’s like a friend, like somebody you love.”

“Why don’t you stay for dinner, Randy?” Kiki offered.

Randy had brought with him sample T-shirts, mainly buxom women in impossibly small bikinis and hard-muscled superheros all pumped up and in a rage.

“People buy this shit?” Soupspoon asked. “I wouldn’t wear sumpin’ like that in the street. Damn! Anybody could see I don’t look like that. I ain’t got no girlfriend look like that neither.”

“Kids buy’em up for the superheros and pinups. I almost always sell fifty shirts, but with you, Soup, I bet I sell all hundred and twenty-five.”

“Hamburgers and sour mash.” Soupspoon lifted his glass in a toast. Kiki’s eyes sparkled.

Soupspoon gave Randy a tin spoon and a mayonnaise jar. He showed the boy how to follow a beat. Then he started playing his guitar. He strummed and sang,

Kiki showed that she had a rough, sexy voice by the second chorus. She cried and sang and laughed with the men.

Soupspoon realized somewhere near midnight that they were playing music. These children weren’t even born when he came around but they were playing his music. They were living it too.

He felt the arthritis in his fingers as they traveled up and down the strings. His hip and leg ached dully under him.

Kiki started to dance and Randy rocked with her. They didn’t know a thing about dancing. But you didn’t need to know anything to dance to those tunes.

After a while Randy left Kiki to dance by herself while he slapped the table, almost in time with Soupspoon’s song. It was like back in the days when Negroes broke stones and one man was their voice. Every line ended with a grunt and the impact of the sixteen-pound hammer.

They played music until the liquor was gone. Then Randy kissed Kiki on both sides of her face and shook the bluesmaster’s hands.

“I’ll pick you up at seven on Saturday, Mr. Wise,” Randy said. He looked at Kiki hopefully, but when she didn’t take his hands he knew that he was going home alone.

The phone rang at three-thirty in the morning.

“Hello?” Kiki said in a drugged voice. She could see Soupspoon still seated at the kitchen table. He was asleep on his folded arms, next to the lacquer-red guitar.

“I know what you did, you cunt.”

“Fez?”

“If you don’t tell them what you did I’m gonna come over there and slip my knife up your goddamned pussy. You understand me?”

Kiki hung up.

She got up and went over to the old man. When she touched his shoulder he turned up his face and cried, “What?” in a small-boy voice. Then he wrapped his arms around Kiki and shuddered.

She took his clothes off without him really waking up and helped him into the bed, pulling the covers snug under his chin.

On the top shelf of the closet, under a stack of three straw hats, was the box Hattie had given Kiki after she came running out to Hattie’s house, crying and bleeding from her ass. A tall thin man as black and shiny as tar was sitting in the front room of her two-room shack. He came into the bedroom after a little while and said, “You cain’t leave that chile here.”

“What I’m s’posed to do, Hector? You want me t’put her out there in the dirt? You more worried about some goddamn white man than you scared’a God?”

“God knows the trouble I got. He ain’t gonna blame me for this here.”

“If you scared then go on,” Hattie said. “An’ git yo’ butt outta here anyway. This girl don’t need to be ’round no men.”

Hector went out but Kiki could hear him from time to time in the other room. She had a fever again like when she had flu. She could always come to Hattie. Hattie listened to every word she ever said.

“Tell me a story,” Kiki begged.

“Shut up, child.”

But Kiki remembered that all she had to do was keep on asking and finally the story would come.

Once there came a loud knock on the door. Hector came in, picked Kiki up from the bed, and took her out of the window and into the woods. He held her rough and tight the way her father did when he wanted to do it. When she tried to scream he held her mouth. She fought against him but he was too strong.

Her nose was stuffy from crying and the skinny man’s hand was clamped tight over her mouth. Kiki went silent as she concentrated on sucking in the slender stream of air through her almost fully clogged nostril.

She got fuzzy-headed.

The light from Hattie’s house looked to her like big colored snowflakes and the loud voice of her father was just a jumble of mad words. “Mr. Waters! Mr. Waters!” was all she could make out from what Hattie said.

When the shouting came out back, Hector pulled further off into the wood. He whispered in her ear, “Sh!” Then he released his hold on her mouth.

She had never, before or since, tasted anything so rich and pure as the air in that deadly wood. Her lungs tingled with the beginnings of pneumonia as her father blundered around lost, unable to find her.

“Kiki! Kiki, you come on out here!” he shouted. “You cain’t run from me, girl! Come out here!”

She was only fourteen but she understood that he had come alone. Alone because he was ashamed and didn’t want his friends to see the blood at the back of her skirt.

But tomorrow, she knew, he’d have his white friends come down. She didn’t care much about that, though. Not while she was sitting on Hector like some old comfortable chair; hard but made to hold her.

She passed out and didn’t come to again until she was in a hunter’s cabin with Hector, deep in the Arkansas woods. The dark man sat next to her cot. The sun shone through a paneless window illuminating the old newsprint used to paper the walls. Hector was washing her bare legs with alcohol, using an old rag and a battered tin pan. He slathered the rag up over her belly and chest. When he let the liquid run cold over her throat she wanted to touch him, to let him know how good it felt, but she was still too weak.

He turned her over and went from between her toes and the soles of her feet all the way up to the nape of her neck. The alcohol burned where it seeped to her rectum but by then she knew that Hector didn’t mean to hurt her. He was trying to save her life.

Hector bathed Kiki at least six times that first day, and he not saying a word. He fed her soup and water, and watched her sleep. He was always touching her, feeling for fever, and whenever he found heat he bathed her in cold.

Kiki suspected that Hector had never been so intimate with a white girl and that he probably enjoyed rubbing her all over. But she didn’t mind his eyes and hands. She didn’t mind him being there when she roused. He could do anything he wanted, because he was Hattie’s friend and his hands were cold and he smelled like the deep Arkansas wood.

The next day Hattie came and clucked and watched over her. Hattie made Kiki drink much more soup than Hector had. She took her outside to pee. She told the half-asleep girl that her father was looking for her and that Hattie had to be careful. She’d only come out twice a week.

Kiki didn’t care, though. She liked being alone with silent Hector.

After three weeks Kiki was strong enough to eat bread. The fever had broken and the pneumonia was almost clear. Hattie had a hundred dollars put away and offered it to take Kiki on a bus to California where her cousin would take her in. Hattie also gave Kiki Hector’s pistol. It was a .32-caliber six-shooter that Hector’s old boss had given to him after a good year.

Hattie taught Kiki how to oil her gun and how to keep it clean. She told her to buy bullets every three years. Kiki went to target practice on her own. She wasn’t a dead shot but she wasn’t afraid to shoot either. She could hit a man at ten paces, that’s all she’d ever need.

On the day she was to leave, Kiki went outside Hector’s shack while Hattie was still packing her bags. Hector was seeing to the litter he’d made to drag the bags down to the road where the Greyhound passed.

Kiki stared at Hector but he kept working as if she wasn’t there.

Finally she asked him, “Would you come with me, Hector?” She hadn’t planned to say it, didn’t even know what she meant. “I mean, come with me to California.”

“What?” That got his attention.

“We could sleep in a big brass bed and eat oranges and work for the movies. You could be a gardener and I’d do makeup work for the stars.” She was surprised at herself — that she had it all worked out.

Hector moved to turn away, but Kiki grabbed him and dug her fingernails into his forearm. Blood came from the deep scratches.

He looked at her again and shuddered. She knew, or thought she knew, at that moment he was almost ready to go. But he was too strong. He pulled her hands away and was lost to her. And that loss was the worst thing, up until this night in New York, that she ever experienced.

Kiki took the gun out and cleaned it sitting next to Soupspoon’s guitar. Then she went back into the closet and found a shoulder purse that she’d be able to carry with her around work.

She brought the purse with her to bed and slept better than she had since she was just a child, sleeping in a big black woman’s arms.